Coming from the early days of the Internet Age, I’m used to basing my e-mail addresses and other contact information off of my real name (sean@…, sshannon@…, seanshannon@… and so on). Back when I first went to Antioch, my e-mail address, as was all students’ there, was based off of my real name, and I couldn’t request it be changed to firedancingspirit@… or something like that. When Dad was first able to access the Internet through his old CompuServe account, his address was based off of his CompuServe ID number, which was about as easy to remember as a phone number, without the convenience of area codes. Although the age of vanity e-mails soon came, I guess I’m kind of old-fashioned, and I kept picking e-mail names — and the domain name for the .org — based off of my name. More than once I’ve had people tell me that they’d think someone as imaginative as I am would come up with something more creative. I guess maybe now that I’m in the work world (or at least as close to "the work world" as academia ever gets), though, maybe it’s a good thing I stuck with identifications that don’t carry any potentially risky baggage.
As I’ve written before, though, this comes with its fair share of risks. My Yahoo! Mail account is based off of my real name, and it’s the one I tend to use whenever I don’t want to give my .org e-mail address out for fear of getting a lot of spam. This was before the spam filters on my server and my computer became better than those on Yahoo! Mail, though, so I’m having to rethink this strategy. Unfortunately, I’ve found that having such a "simple," easy-to-remember e-mail address on Yahoo! Mail means that many other people will also give it out as their e-mail, either accidentally or on purpose. Honestly, I’m beginning to expect it’s more of the latter, as my Yahoo! Mail account is quickly becoming unmanageable from all of the spam I’m getting. Even with as much of it as the servers filter out, maintaining that e-mail is becoming more of a hassle than it feels it’s worth to me.
Perhaps the worst spam of all I get on there is the political spam. At least one of the organizations I get spam from is because of my own actions — a particularly beligerent Democratic recruiter coaxed that e-mail out of me in 2004 trying to get me to support John Kerry’s presidential bid — but I also get a lot of junk mail from Republican and conservative and Christian groups that I know I never signed up for. (I’m also on the mailing list of this one Democratic politican in Virginia for some reason.) Ironically enough, that e-mail address is also the same address I use for the political e-mails I want to get, so I have to sort through the e-mails I get from Ralph Nader and the Green Party as well, and Yahoo! Mail sometimes flags those as false positives for spam. (For those of you who were on Obama or McCain’s e-mail lists during the campaign, I don’t know if you’re still getting e-mail from them or not, but Nader’s been sending regular e-mails continuing the push for a single-payer health care system.)
The biggest punch line in here, though, is the content of the e-mails I get from all the various political organizations. Setting aside solicitations for donations — a necessity of our political system in its current incarnation — my Green and Democratic e-mails are pretty much all about substance, trying to inform me on various issues and get me involved in them. On the other hand, many of the Republican and Christian organizations that send me e-mail also try to sell me stuff, ranging from life insurance to miracle cures. Some organizations send me more sales stuff than political stuff. Ultimately, all politicans are salespeople, trying to sell me on their vision of how the city or country or world should be, but when you use an ostensibly politically-minded organization to try to get me to buy these material items, it just strikes me as absurd. Unfortunately, given the current state of American politics, it probably doesn’t seem so absurd to most of you.